1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a method of coding data for transmission in a communication medium or channel.
2. Description of Related Art
In recent years, the wireless communications industry has grown in popularity with the development of new technologies that provide increased performance and speed. On a daily basis, people access, share, and exchange information with cellular telephones, personal computers, satellite communication devices, and various other personal and business computing systems. Modern communication devices are no longer bound by hardwired networks where wireless local area networks (WLAN) are implemented.
IEEE 802.11 defines various standards for wireless local area networks that currently include six over-the-air modulation techniques that utilize the same wireless communication protocol. The most widely accepted techniques are those defined by the IEEE 802.11a, b, and g standards. Other standards in IEEE 802.11 include c-f, h-j, and n, which are service enhancements, extensions, or corrections to previous standard specifications.
In modern wireless communications systems, data and information are encoded using compression and error correction algorithms to improve performance, integrity, and security of the transmitted data and information. There are many different coding processes for encoding messages. One such coding process includes a low density parity check (LDPC) code that utilizes a sparse parity check matrix. A sparse matrix is a matrix populated mostly with zeros. In LDPC code, the sparse matrix can be generated either randomly or by algebraic methods and subject to predefined constraints. These codes were first designed by Gallager in 1962.
Unfortunately, the coding technique of LDPC codes are highly complex and often require storing large sparse matrices, which can be difficult. Due to the demand of wireless services to support high data rates for multi-media applications, such as streaming video and high-speed web surfing, wireless communication service providers require a hardware infrastructure that can support these high data rates. Therefore, there currently exists a need for communication systems to employ LDPC codes efficiently to support high data rates without introducing greater complexity to the hardware infrastructure.